smoke and mediation
by cordialcount
Summary: Celty offers Shizuo calm, justification, and a motorcycle ride.


The gangster is not fast enough.

Celty is faster, her helmet one bright wall as she slams Shizuo's fist into brick, driving right under his guard where the would-be assassin had failed to slip a knife, and against her his momentum dissolves like a breath in winter. They watch the man stumble away, screaming about monsters and missed payments: things common in their district. Celty carefully plasters a black web along his arm so he can't move; Shizuo tries his damned best not to watch her text. He finds talking treacherous, even with Celty. He still itches to run after and punch someone. Pain, a clean message.

[Hey, Shizuo,] she waves before his face. [Stop moving.]

He's been struggling with no real faith he can break free. Celty has held hundreds of people to the ground as firmly as pouring concrete about their feet. He's still touched that she notices his flexing, though; Shinra says she can choose what her shadow-stuff pays attention to, and right now it seems to be all over him.

(_My Celty's beautiful essence is most reliable,_ actually, which has only not resulted in rib breakage because Shizuo recognizes when Shinra pushes it for fun. He isn't going to risk his composure just to indulge the masochistic dickery of Celty's—friend.)

"Sorry," he says, back to the present stinging of his fingers crushed against the wall. "I don't want to hurt you, just that cockroach Izaya. I'll kill—"

[Let's not talk about him. He gives me enough crap during work.]

"Sorry," he says again, before he notices she's tapping her knuckles along the cat's chin. She's laughing. He stares into the night beyond the alley mouth, where the gangster has melted back to wherever Izaya gets his parade of blade-wielding fleas, and lets her lean against his shoulder and laugh and laugh until his bloodlust drifts away, too, to wherever it came from.

[You were tickling me!] she writes. [It's nothing, as long as you have yourself in order and won't do anything rash. Will you complain if I have you sit down?]

"Nah. Go ahead." He tells himself to hold still. She grins one more time and disengages the tendrils over his hand. All of them except one narrow band about his wrist, by which she pulls him past rubbish bins and abandoned pipes into the lamplight, like a child, an indulgence, an acknowledgement of caretaking. He feels a thin frisson of frustration run down his spine—if he doesn't believe he can control himself, what other person will?—but the unyielding dark of her suit and extensions remind him that she's Celty, unique in her own. _It's fine_. He focuses on that until she maneuvers him to a vending machine and very, very casually knocks it over for him to sit on. She has power and, unlike him and the fellow children of this city, the ability not to use it.

Celty curls in beside him and exposes her headless neck to the night breeze. [Anyway, you'd be bored if you didn't have to defend yourself!]

"It's not really about them," he says. "Those idiots aren't going to end me without another gun. Nobody wants the police stopping the game..." He sees the twitch of her hand and tracks his line of thought away. "Even if Shinra's willing to treat all of them, there's going to be that 0.00000000, whatever percentage, that don't make it."

She crosses her legs and sits quiet for a while, one of her knees almost warm on his thigh. [Listen, you're all right.]

"This shit isn't alright." She points at a character on her screen. "I know, you mean me. But that's why I can't say his name without wanting to shove him through the pavement, Celty. No one cares if I don't."

[This is your city. Now mine, but not in the way you know it.] She's started kicking the frame over a picture of Red Snake; when he cranes his head down to look at the material of her shoes, the clacking louder than he expects for a heel covered only in shadows, the dents on the corner of the disposal suggest he's thrown this particular machine before. The recognition sits in his stomach like stone. Her ankle comes deftly around his neck and lifts him back up to read her typing. [I think that doesn't mean that you're responsible for everyone here, though. You can be happy without saving everyone, or something.]

She can navigate Ikebukuro like she was born to its overpasses, its towers of tetris played in office lights. Everyone knows her as the Black Rider of Ikebukuro, nowhere else. It weighs him down to think he knows more about this place because he is so frequently to blame for destroying it, so he grabs the metal edge of the machine and crunches it until he's made a hollow for his hands; he can slump back, then, and she can rest her shoulder in the crook of his neck. The haze over her collar is somehow darker than the evening and nowhere near as cold. "Are you content?" Shizuo asks.

[You come to me,] she writes, [we eat sushi and watch Shinra's movies. You come to me and save little girls with me. There are reasons I've stopped searching for my head.]

Celty dealt death once, he remembers, and now plies the trade of the living. She has a way of making him relax into her presence, but it doesn't pull the ache out of her words. He has never wanted to serve as a reason, which feels like being a burden. Even if she lacks the heart to mind him.

So he should take initiative, even if he doesn't want to, even if every passing pedestrian has glanced at Heiwajima Shizuo, bartender in blood, and given him a ten-meter berth before they can even pass their eyes over Celty. If Celty's back is stronger than any wall. "I have to go."

[Come with me! We have a new special tonight, and Shinra promises no more dissections in this one. You'll like it.]

"I have to _go_," he says, getting to his feet.

[You'll be mugged. Then I'll have to come back for you.] The last wisp of smoke lingers long over the keyboard, as though celebrating a triumph she's barely resisted elaborating on, then suddenly multiplies into a lattice all over his body, catches him exactly where he stands. [Do you think you can escape this, anyway? Persuade me, if you really want to!]

"No, no, no," he says. He discovers with disconcerting speed that he is smiling.

[Come,] she flashes at him. This time the shadows recede as he follows her to Shooter, then fold a helmet over his head to match the one she clips over herself: two ears perked up in attention, glass that holds the warmth of his blood in for him. He nods at the seat. They've ridden together many times, but he's always clung so tightly to her it's never looked small.

"You can't use your stuff to make the seat bigger, huh?"

[After a while, we're set in our ways. Both me and Shooter. And us, I think, you and me.]

He waits for her to sit, but she doesn't move for several seconds. _Do you want to change your mind? I wouldn't hold anything against you—_

[You first,] the screen says. His held breath comes out, startled and fey. He clambers on. Alone on its back, he feels it come to life and purr like a friendly cat.

Then she swings up behind him, and even if only he has the lungs to work faster in anticipation, he thinks she's content, one arm around his torso a barrier against chill as she dangles a last text before him.

[I trust you to take us where we need to go.]

* * *

**A/N:** All feedback is deeply appreciated.

Written for Valentine's Day 2013; Celty & Shizuo were the first to come to mind for friendshippy conversations. n_n


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